In Brief: As interest among academic librarians in critical pedagogy has grown, discussions about this concept and its implications for librarianship have been richly expanding our ways of conceiving of library instruction and of our (librarians’) instructional roles. At the same time, this concept is still a relatively new one for our field. We may...

In Brief Hoping to bring the unexpected to Nebraska City, the Morton-James Public Library applied for an ALA Association for Library Service to Children Curiosity Creates grant to undertake an ambitious project: build an escape room. In a library storage room. With children. The hope was by trying something completely different, we could increase interest...

In Brief: This article makes connections between the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and the activity of survey mark hunting. After a brief review of the literature related to geographic information systems (GIS), information literacy, and gamification of learning, the authors enter into a dialogue in which they discover and describe the...

In Brief Critical information literacy asks librarians to work with their patrons and communities to co-investigate the political, social, and economic dimensions of information, including its creation, access, and use. This approach to information literacy seeks to involve learners in better understanding systems of oppression while also identifying opportunities to take action upon them. An...

In Brief: In 2014, a small group of librarians at the University of Tennessee set out to redefine the library conference landscape. Frustrated by the high cost and lack of tangible skills and takeaways at professional organization gatherings, they conceived of a low-cost, high-value symposium where academic librarians might learn, create, and collaborate together. The...

Image by flickr user ashokboghani (CC BY-NC 2.0) In Brief: This article was written to describe the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center’s (HSLIC) catalog cleanup process prior to migrating to a new integrated library system (ILS). Catalogers knew that existing catalog records would need to be cleaned up before the...

In Brief: Good design makes documents easier to use, helps documents stand out from other pieces of information, and lends credibility to document creators. Librarians across library types and departments provide instruction and training materials to co-workers and library users. For these materials to be readable and accessible, they must follow guidelines for usable document design....

In Brief: Reference services are at a cross-roads. While many academic libraries continue to offer reference services from behind a desk, others are moving to roving and embedded reference models. Meanwhile, libraries are also engaged in the development of collaborative learning spaces—often rich with technology, such as makerspaces and learning labs—but these spaces are often...

In Brief: How do we measure the impact of our outreach programming? While there is a lot of information about successful outreach activities in the library literature, there is far less documentation of assessment strategies. There may be numerous barriers to conducting assessment, including a lack of time, money, staff, knowledge, and administrative support. Further,...

by Editorial Board Hello friends and readers! We’re writing to let you know about a change in our publication strategy, effective immediately. Moving forward, we will be publishing articles on a rolling basis, instead of on every other Wednesday. At the moment, fewer submissions are coming in, but we still think In The Library With...